I received this timely and topical letter a few weeks ago:
Hello,
Now is the time of year when all the 3L’s at every law school are enjoying the time between graduation and starting their bar review (at least for me). Do you have any advice for us on how to keep our sanity during this 10 week adventure and not go crazy or over-stress when the big day finally comes?
Thanks,
JD2010
It got me thinking about my own bar exam experience – and brought back a memory from my law school days.
Close to graduation time, I was having a final meeting with a professor with whom I’d written a journal article. It was a pleasant meeting – the article was in print and he was pleased with it. He even said he was going to use it as part of his syllabus for a seminar. I was feeling as close to a super-star as I ever got in law school.
At some point I confided my concerns about the approaching bar exam. I told him it gave me butterflies in my stomach.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he assured me. “Only the real knuckle-draggers fail the bar exam.”
We shared a laugh, I shook his hand and left his office, but I knew – more than anything in the world – that I needed to pass that exam. I didn’t want to be a “knuckle-dragger.” I’m guessing you don’t want to be one, either.
The bar is a weird exam. It goes on forever, deals mostly with trivia, and no one cares how they do on it – you only have to pass.
In real world terms, the exam is entirely useless. At best, it gives you a smattering of a details from state law. At worst, it’s downright bizarre. I remember blowing a practice question because – it turns out – smoke-damaged – not charred – wood, didn’t count as evidence of arson in NY State. The wood had to be burned by a flame. Or something like that. I stared at the answer, wondering how anything so impossibly obscure could make it onto a statewide, standardized exam. But there were plenty of questions like that.
Anyway – first, here’s my exam-taking advice, handed down from my old roommate at Harvard, who went to Columbia Law School and got his JD a couple years before me. My psychotherapist advice will follow.
The trick to studying for the bar is not to bother with bar review lectures – they are a waste of time. Just take all the study materials and give yourself four hours to study them every weekday morning, from 9 am – 1 pm, for about three or four weeks.
Read the outlines front to back, slowly and carefully, then do all the practice tests, and outline each and every one of the practice essay questions. Check everything, make sure you understand anything you got wrong on the practice tests and – voila! You’ll do fine. In fact, you’ll be over-prepared, which is the idea.
At some point you’ll realize you know everything – even the bar only covers a discrete universe of information. I was so over-prepared that I spent the last few days before the exam hanging out at my cousin’s beach house, relaxing. By that time, I knew what I needed to know and it was getting repetitious.
If you follow this method, you will most likely follow in our paths and do extremely well on the bar exam – better than you have to do.
For years now, I’ve shared this advice with friends and clients. To a man, they have rejected it.
One client, last week, said “that’s not going to happen.”
I asked why, and she said “because I could never do that.”
Now I’ll put my psychotherapist hat back on, and talk about the infantilizing effects of legal education.
The entire law school process, and the profession itself, is extremely competitive. Everyone is competing with everyone else to do basically the same thing.
No one wants to be a “knuckle-dragger,” so you play it safe, and do what everyone else is doing.
Your fear of being singled out as a failure, especially on the last big event, the bar exam, is so terrifying that it regresses you into a child, who collapses into helplessness. So you sign up for bar review and vow to do whatever they tell you.
I’m scared. Hold my hand. Walk me to lecture, spoon-feed me the material. I’ll be good. Promise me, if I do everything you say, I’ll pass.
Bar review isn’t that different from law school itself. Going to lectures in school is a waste of time, too. It would be more efficient to teach yourself the same material.
I knew a guy first year at NYU who skipped lectures. Instead, he bought commercial outlines, did the reading, and outlined answers to old exam questions. It took a lot of nerve to break the rules like that and follow his own instinct, but it paid off. He got straight A’s and transferred to Yale. If I had law school to do again, that’s how I’d do it – like a grown-up.
The problem was that I was too scared back then. I wanted reassurance that if I did exactly what I was told I would be okay – I wouldn’t be a knuckle-dragger.
Sure – we all learn differently. If you like watching a long, drawn-out lecture instead of reading the same material out of a book, be my guest.
On the other hand, if you have trouble staring at something complicated in a book, figuring it out on your own and writing about it – well, I’m sorry, but that’s what lawyers do for a living. They don’t sit in lectures being spoon fed material by kindly professors charging two hundred dollars per hour.
Most of the people who fail the bar exam aren’t really knuckle-draggers. They’re students who take the regression to child-like helplessness to the extreme. They employ wishful thinking, pretending that if they go through the motions of child-like obedience – show up at each and every bar review lecture and sit quietly doing what they’re told – they will automatically pass.
That’s not going to happen.
You have to actually address this material as an adult, on your own terms, and learn it.
Another major reason why people fail the bar is that they create an unconscious distraction. Suddenly, just as you’re preparing for this exam, you have the big breakup with your girlfriend and have to walk around staring into the middle distance muttering fragments of French poetry. That sort of thing.
If you don’t want to take the bar, don’t take it. But make that decision consciously – don’t design an unconscious distraction to hide that you’re terrified to face this very adult challenge. People break up, or sustain whatever personal life upset comes their way, and they still pass the bar exam. You just contain your feelings and focus on the matter at hand.
Why would you regress into helplessness or create a distraction to avoid studying for the bar? Probably because you’re afraid, deep down, that you’re not very good at this stuff.
It’s worth at least posing the question: if you’re terrible at this sort of thing – memorizing masses of dull material and spitting it back out in a lightly re-processed form – why are you pursuing law? You’re only going to get out there and find yourself reading reams of not-always-scintillating material, then turning it into memos, briefs, contracts and the like.
The all-too-common answer is “because I have loans to pay off.” That answer reduces you to a helpless indentured servant, working off your debts to purchase freedom.
If that’s why you’re taking the bar, it’s no wonder you’re not really into it. But you might as well own your feelings, so you can try to contain them, and get on with the task at hand, which is a lot of dull memorization and the endless grind of practice tests.
Don’t worry – if you fail the bar, it doesn’t mean you’re a knuckle-dragger. But it might suggest you’re not acting like a fully aware, autonomous adult.
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This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
If you enjoy these columns, please check out The People’s Therapist’s new book, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning
I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy
(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.)
The People's Therapist 
While I agree that the bar exam lectures are only slightly helpful (and less helpful than spending the same amount of time studying on your own), they can be a useful source of socialization for law graduates.
It’s easy to become a complete hermit while studying for the bar exam, and it’s probably a good idea to hole away for a week or two before the exam. But, you don’t need to spend 10 weeks in isolated study. Isaac Newton did that and…well, revolutionized math and physics, …bad example.
Anyways, my point is that bar exam classes are filled with people going through the exact same thing you are. Your non-lawyer friends and family won’t understand the stress of marathon studying and the pressure you face to not fail the exam (especially in a shit economy). Bar exam classes can be a good place to find people who know exactly what’s going on in your life. You just need to be careful to avoid the people who are too wound up and will only suck you into their world of freaking out about everything.
[…] sure to check out Will Meyerhofer’s tips for surviving bar exam stress. | | | | | […]
I respectfully disagree with this study advice. In fact, I did the complete opposite and passed both New York and Connecticut with flying colors.
I did not open an outline all summer, but I went to every single class, took meticulous class notes and then made an outline of each subject using the class notes. I passed without even opening the books. I’m not saying the books are useless, but I am saying that the class is extremely valuable. Most teachers introduce their class by saying “I am about to cover everything you need to know for [insert subject].” The books, which cover entirely too much material, are meant as a supplement to the class — not the other way around. Without the class, one would never know what parts of the reading are the most important and commonly tested. Consequently, a lot of time would be wasted on material that has not appeared on a bar exam in 20 years.
Likewise, I take issue with the suggestion that the best way to study for exams is by turning to commercial outlines and avoiding class. A large part of doing well in law school requires one to determine what the professor wants, and what parts of the class the professor thinks are important. I frequently heard stories about students who studied from commercial outlines and ended up discussing materials on the exam that the professor never even covered in class. Perhaps this information was the more relevant to the question than what the professor did cover, but that’s not the point. Students will not earn points if they discuss foreign materials on the exam.
Perhaps, objectively, the best way to learn the law is from commercial outlines. However, the goal of most law students is to do well in school so they can secure a good job. Doing well requires them to understand what the professor expects of them, not a different professor’s — i.e., a commercial outline’s — summary of the course. As one professor put it on Above The Law: “The use of foreign material from a commercial outline or supplement usually leads to trouble. I recognize the foreign material quickly. If a student feels the need to use the supplement on the exam, odds are, I wasn’t testing for the concept that they thought. The exam-taker probably had access to a more on-point and basic rule from the course that he could have applied. If the commercial outline gets it right, and you get it right, I will be forgiving. But the use of the supplement alone rings the ‘they didn’t understand the problem’ bell.”
Putting aside the merits of that argument, if that is how most professors feel (and I suspect it is), then your post offers students who don’t know any better dangerous advice.
First, law professors aren’t going to advertise the fact that they are irrelevant, are they? Second, when I say read a commercial outline, I hope that implies THINK while reading it. No, you shouldn’t regurgitate it up on an exam or you will look like you just regurgitated up a commercial outline. You have be comfortable enough with the material to write fluently and on-point. You’re being tested on caselaw and doctrine – not lectures or outlines. Where and how you do your learning is up to you.
I spent about 6 hours/day studying; 3 or so in the morning at BarBri lecture, the remainder in the local library working PMBR practice tests on the subject matter. This was probably not an optimal way to spend money – it was the most expensive route at ~$4k – but it worked well (passed in GA by a comfortable margin, very little stress after day 1). In any event, the “teach yourself” meme is great and all, but almost nobody has that kind of discipline absent some sort of prop. For me, it was going to the lectures and then the library, a nice routine, and away from home/pets/computers/music/beer.
Plus the bit about the guy skipping “lectures” to study on his own is nice, but a completely misleading outlier. Yes, “lectures” given like college undergrad lectures have very little value for the motivated, but a real Socratic dialogue can be useful, even a great learning experience. I certainly learned the most from my law professors who were Socratic-oriented, secondly from those whose classes were more project-oriented. Learned nada from those who just lectured (thankfully, very few).
I agree, lectures in the Bar Review process are a waste of time. But come on, your friend who got straight As by using commercial outlines? He probably missed a LOT of good lectures. Forgive me for being off tone here, but law school is not, at least it wasn’t for me, just about getting a permission slip to take a bar exam to work as an attorney. Law school can be a place to sharpen the mind in a way that is unique to the law– just like literature, the arts, science all are disciplines that are worth studying systematically, in depth, under people who have devoted years of effort thinking about and studying the field. I had a Con Law professor who was a joy to listen to, quirky, knowledgable, a former Supremes clerk, and very very right wing. This was the late 70s and early 80s. I thought he was a hoot. But now that his brand of thinking is the mainstream, I have a greater understanding of it than if I just studied the contents of commercial outline. The same can be said about my incredibly engaging contracts professor, my straight out of central casting criminal law professor– heck, I had Sam Dash’s brother teaching legal ethics in the same decade as Watergate. So, whatever steps you take–and whatever lectures you skip– to pass the bar, be my guest. But you cheat yourself if you don’t take advantage of the unique opportunity to really lear in depth stuff from very good people by attending the lectures at law school. There are of course a few duds, but does that keep you from going to the movies or watching TV?
You are 100% right on this post. I took two bar exams and failed both the first time around- because I did exactly what you said- I followed the lectures with child-like obedience and created enough of a distraction with my ex-boyfriend outside of the lectures to avoid actually studying. I passed the second time around, and then a few years later, another state bar doing exactly what you suggest- teaching myself the material and learning it on my own. It’s tedious and it sucks, but you are right- that is the life of a lawyer and you need to act like a lawyer when you study for the bar and not like an ideological law student. If you are not the kind of person who remembers things easily, you just have to study and memorize harder. You have to skip family events, parties, bbqs, whatever it is to study. And study some more. And guess what- practicing law is much the same. Your client doesn’t care what you planned to do over the weekend- he/she just cares that you file that reply brief on Monday morning that you get at 5:00 p.m. on Thurs.
The bar sucks. You can’t be a lawyer if you don’t pass one, however. Whether you want to be a lawyer is another story entirely…